🌙 Talking Circle: Beyond Love and Light

# 🌙 Talking Circle: Beyond Love and Light

### Spiritual Bypassing, Shadow & the Courage to Feel

📍 Pyle Adult Recreation Center – Tempe, AZ
🗓️ Wednesday, July 1 | 6:00–7:30 PM

Healing is not always comfortable. While spirituality can offer profound insight, hope, and connection, it can also become a way of avoiding difficult emotions, unresolved wounds, or uncomfortable truths. Sometimes, in our desire to feel better, we unintentionally bypass the very experiences that are asking for our attention.

In this Talking Circle, we explore spiritual bypassing—the tendency to use spiritual beliefs, practices, or even healing experiences to avoid grief, anger, fear, accountability, or emotional pain. From a psychological perspective, avoidance is a natural protective strategy. From an Indigenous perspective, healing often asks us to walk toward what is difficult, not around it.

We will also reflect on the role of non-ordinary states of consciousness and how profound spiritual or psychedelic experiences can either support genuine healing or become another way of escaping the work of integration.

✨ In this circle, we’ll explore:

• What spiritual bypassing is and how it shows up in everyday life
• The difference between healing and avoidance
• The role of shadow, grief, anger, and discomfort in growth
• When spirituality supports accountability—and when it can obscure it
• Psychedelics and non-ordinary states as tools for insight versus escape
• Embodiment, relationship, and community as pathways to integration

This gathering offers a compassionate and non-judgmental space to reflect on the places where we may be avoiding, bypassing, or protecting ourselves—and how we can move toward greater wholeness with honesty and care.

Donation-based. All are welcome.
Come sit with us as we explore what lies beyond love and light—where healing becomes deeper, more authentic, and fully human. 🌙